Geek of the Week: Randy Schmidt of Forge38

This week’s geek is Randy Schmidt, independent developer of Forge38. You’ve probably encountered some of his past work with iSepta, shareURmeal, Lose it or Lose it and Nerd Merit Badges.

Hi Randy, tell me about yourself. I know you’re an independent developer, but what how did you get to where you are?

I graduated from Drexel in 2005 with a structural engineering degree and started working as a structural engineer. I had started to play with web development in college but it ramped up after I graduated. I built a couple of web apps for the engineering company based on some ideas I had while working as an engineer.

After a couple of years, I realized it wasn’t going where I wanted so I started thinking about going out on my own. I realized I was a bit socially awkward so I started operation “Learn to Socialize”. I started going to a bunch of meetups around Philly and took some days off of work to go to Cream Cheese sessions (IndyHall before it was IndyHall). It was all these meetups that led me to think about and eventually work on iSepta (I’ll get to that later).

In July 2007 I was getting more and more frustrated with my engineering job and quit. They immediately went into damage control mode and tried to keep me in _some_ capacity. They said I could work part time so I could gently move into working for myself. They dragged their feet for several weeks and came back with “You’ll have to work four days a week to keep benefits”. I was a little annoyed because it seemed like they were trying to get me to cool off then stay as full-time. I sent an email back that I didn’t care about benefits, “I was ready to quit without them three weeks ago”. So yeah, when I came back in on Monday they fired me .

It took me about a month before I was up to speed with enough client work so it was a little scary. I quickly found that although I had little experience building software professionally, I was fairly practical in how I built things so clients seemed to like me. I haven’t had a problem getting client work ever since.

One of the things I did early on was work A LOT of hours to build up a nest egg in my business. It wasn’t fun but it has really allowed me to take time off to work on other projects the last few years.

What are some notable projects past and present that you’ve worked on or most proud of? I distinctly remember finding iSepta long before I met you and always happy to see mention of it pop up places. I just saw it as an example on (the recently launched) OpenDataPhilly.org.

iSepta is notable in that it was built only shortly after I quit my engineering job. I was going to a lot of meetups and always needed to look up what train was leaving next so I knew if I had to leave right away or could stay for a while to chat. It was impossible to read the schedules on an iPhone so I wanted something better. I tweeted about it some and Chris Conley came on board to help build it. He did all of the SEPTA schedule parsing (and deserves a medal). We had a prototype really quickly and after some convincing, got Jason Tremblay to do the design. iSepta has been great because it really does open up doors in Philly. Many of the people I have met since then have known about and used iSepta before I even met them. It has given me some credibility in the community. I no longer really work on it, Chris Conley is maintaining and supporting it now.

I have two other projects, Nerd Merit Badges and Lose It or Lose It. Nerd Merit Badges came about because I contributed something to open source and felt very proud, I thought I needed some kind of merit badge. My biz partner John and I started thinking about it and launched the “Open Source Contributor” badge shortly after.

Lose It or Lose It is a site where you lose the weight or you lose your money. I created it because I was sick of trying to lose weight and giving up after 2-3 weeks. If I failed after a couple of weeks, basically, my life would go back to being normal. I wanted to find a way to make it so that my life was _worse_ if I gave up after a few weeks, and the easiest way to do that is to take away one’s money. I launched the site in November 2009 and have lost 80lb since! John Young joined me on the site in March 2010.

Nerd Merit Badges are awesome. Can you sew?

Haha, thanks. Not really, although at one point my mom taught me how to install zippers so I could have have pants that allowed me to put on shin/knee pads for biking. They were pretty sweet.

I just noticed the name for your web development shop, Forge38 has an ampersand (&) for the 8 in the logo. That’s really cool. I’ve always been meaning to ask… what does Forge38 mean? How did you come up with that name?

Hehe, yeah, I call that the “Eightpersand”. 38 is the decimal [1] equivalent of the &. My username everywhere is r38y (r&y = randy) and so I wanted a company name that was tied to that. It’s “Forge38″ because we make stuff

Thanks for talking to me, Randy!

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Check out Randy’s past and present projects at Forge38.com